Some Part of You, Too Small To Lose
by The Hart and Hound
Summary: [Lamento] You remember him as a time of day, but only one, because the rest of them he gave to someone else, and she will tell you little. [Leaks cannot so easily share with others. LeaksShui, ShuiKonoe’s mother.]


Title: Some Part of You, Too Small to Lose

Author: tsubaki-hana

Series: Lamento beyond the void

Rating: T

Disclaimer: Lamento belongs to Nitro+CHIRAL.

Summary: You remember him as a time of day, but only one, because the rest of them he gave to someone else, and she will tell you little. (Leaks cannot so easily share with others. Leaks/Shui, Shui/Konoe's mother.)

* * *

_Oh, what a noble mind is here o'ethrown!_

_The courtier's, scholar's, soldiers, eye, tongue, sword,_

_Th' expectancy and rose of the fair state,_

_the glass of fashion, and the mould of form,_

_th' observ'd of all observers – quite, quite down!_

-Shakespeare, _Hamlet, Act III, I, Ophelia to Hamlet._

* * *

It is not to say that the two of you were lovers, no, you would hardly consider each other friends, even if Shui will say otherwise and laugh in that airy way of his, not at all like the singer he ought to be and very much like a hollowed out tree. And when he laughs, you are always certain that in some way he is laughing at you as well. There's a joke written somewhere in the squinting lines next to his eyes, green, sort of like the wormwood you grow nearby for sorcery and chewing between your teeth. (_It makes you dizzy, those leaves, those eyes, and sometimes you just have to close your own and wait for the moment to pass_.)

"You always seem so offended when I deign to visit,"says Shui, and today he is tuning the strings of his lute with a carelessness that exasperates you, but always seems to sound right at the end. Between clawed fingers, the wrapped hair wire is shaking with tension. "Are you worried that I'm going to let someone know you're out here?"

"Intentionally or otherwise, you certainly could," you say, and try to sound gruffer than you usually do. Shui always takes everything you say entirely too lightly. "This place is all I have, and I won't have an idiot such as yourself losing it for me."

Shui laughs, and you look away. The wave of color that makes his scarf is the only thing in your vision, and instead of wormwood you are now reminded of the flowering peach tree from across the firth of wood, the one with the twisted branches and cheery soft pink petals that don't have sense enough to disappear like snow, and instead decay on the ground, in the stream, on your doorstep. Irritation and magic crackle beneath the skin of your fingertips, and you resist the desire to reach up a hand and slap that pleasant smile straight off his face.

"I'm serious," you say.

"I know," he says, "but I still think you ought to trust me a little more than you do. I've been coming here for a while now, and if I really wanted you turned in, then I would have done so already, 'intentional or otherwise'." The strings of the lute shake when he pulls them taut, and you pretend that their ringing doesn't make your ears flatten against your head.

"You're entirely too comfortable with my house for someone so reluctantly let into my house," you grumble, cutting hemlock roots with both your hands, feeling the juice numb the careless cuts you have acquired. You cannot see them, but you know they are there all the same.

"But you let me in all the same."

You twist your braid and throw it around your neck, not thinking of nooses and meddlesome cats that think they have the run of places that they don't belong. And your heart does not painfully lurch at the thought, when Shui leaves for the day, the red moonlight filtering across his hair and throwing it into cast gold and orange.

He'll be back tomorrow, you think disgustedly, same time, same smile.

* * *

Shui will never be fully yours, or at least you will never have his whole attention. You are not the only one that occupies his thoughts, and you have come into this not-friendship knowing this. You don't know who she is, but he raptures about her enough to make you sick and send him home before the afternoon is even over. He always frowns awkwardly when you do this, because he is displeased to leave and not sure what he has done to irritate you.

"You're such a touch-me-not, tell-me not," he says in a sing-song voice. "One would think that talking was a sin with how many times you've sent me home for daring to talk about something other than the weather or yourself."

"I do not oppose your talking so much as your love-sick caterwauling about your lady cat back in the village. If she has heard half as much about me and I have heard about her, then we are well-informed enough to consider each other family." Not even you can chase the ill humor from your voice."

Shui frowns for a moment, but then is back to his grinning self. "I do talk about you, you know. Not to everyone, because people are fickle, but to Datura, I say as much as my mouth will allow me to say with each breath."

Your response is biting. "Oh then, by all means, bring your lady love here, and we will rapture about your frankness of character and inability to keep your instrument in tune for more than a few hours before feeling the need to fix the strings. Surely she has become as great a lover of music as myself."

"Take care there, Leaks. That sounds strongly of bitterness, and I know someone as proud as yourself will not allow such weakness of character." A bitter laugh, and Shui is off through the door, pulling his hood up and looking to the horizon.

You grind your teeth, but do not bother to contradict. But this is okay, you think, because even if she is out there and is equal, if not greater than myself in his heart, these afternoons and moonfalls will always be mine. You are insistent that it is only his heart that is of concern, and are able to continue making satchels of poultice with your willful ignorance far from sight and mind.

Datura, you think. Moonflower, Thorn Apple, Gypsum Weed, Devil's Snare. It takes a romantic fool to want to marry someone named after a hateful plant. But Datura blooms in the evenings, long after he has left you, and she is the one that will continuously erase you from his mind and overshadow the hours before she has spread her white petals. (_And don't think so hard, because you do not want to imagine this lacy white woman wrapped around Shui like some tangle vine, legs crossed around his slim waist and branch fingers curled into his red hair. Something inside you convulses at the thought of this woman being so ardently loved, like you never can be_.)

"Just as well," you mutter to yourself. "Shui is ignorant enough to not even consider such a portentous name. He may keep his devil's snare."

Despite the sudden conviction, you feel afternoons are suddenly not enough.

* * *

"I've only let you in because it's raining, and it would be a shame if you ruined your lute because you're too foolish to leave it at home and make sure you don't risk your perfectly good instrument and livelihood. Cherry wood stains and warps, and then not only would you sound horrible, but your playing as well."

You raise a hand before he has time to laugh and show his white teeth. If you know how petulant you look frowning, you don't do anything to correct the impression. "Don't even start, not today, and stay away from me and the nightshade. It has taken me a year to grow it under the eaves of the house, and the last thing I need is for you to distract me with your silly twittering."

"Ah yes," he says, snickering, "I wouldn't want to come between you and your beloved plants. There are some days that I think you like the chamomile in the front walk better than me, and that's even a common plant!"

You face him, watching him wipe his wet hair from his forehead, eyes bright and pale against his darkened brows and tresses. He's still smiling in that aggravating way of his, and this time, you are quite certain he is waiting to hear his statement contradicted. (_But you are not so very kind, and only consider to yourself that now you can bring him down a level, maybe change the shelf he is on in your heart, somewhere farther away and far away from the percussions_.)

"You should value common things," you say, trying to sound dignified and as old as you are. "Once you take those everyday, commonplace things for granted, they are no longer very special, and you will not appreciate them until they are gone."

"Speaking from experience?" asks Shui, and you see that his smile has gentled. This ruffles you badly.

"You don't live as long as me and not learn a few things because of it. The disadvantage of longevity is the inevitable death of everything else. You may find either its mortality endearing, or you will learn to resent it."

You move past him now, feeling very soft and unprotected, but steely all the same. The paradox, the magician. That is you, and you draw your pretentious vanity around you so that when Shui laughs next you will not be so very offended. But Shui does not laugh, only sets his lute against the wall next to the door and pulls his hood down.

"Are you so very opposed to company?"he asks, and you act as though you don't hear the hurt hiding underneath it.

"I kept birds," you say, and for a moment, the softness is erased from Shui's face and replaced with confusion. The aging afternoon draws stark lines across the wrinkle of his brow. "I know it will not seem like so very much to someone like you, or any other ribica for that matter. They are just birds, right? Little finches and sparrows that sit on your roof and sing their coarse little songs. Nothing so lovely as a canary or sanga."

You risk a quick glance, but turn your glance back to your plant pairing knives, carefully held in their leather pouch.

"They don't live long, you understand, and not long to someone like you is even shorter to someone like myself. But they were perfectly happy to sit on my back window and sing their ugly songs. I'm sure they're very beautiful to each other of course," you add, and smile your own little crooked smile to Shui, wondering if you mean more than you say. (_To tell the truth, you don't know either_.) "Either way, I found them rather annoying, but enjoyed the extra noise."

You frown, when you see Shui's expectant and sympathetic face looking from behind his cowl, eyes glassy and feverish with the rainwater. He is very soft looking, and with a certainty that you'd like to say you don't have, you know that death is a disease, and it always finds a way to him, physically or otherwise.

You panic, or at least panic in the way that someone like yourself can."They're all dead now." You end with, words running together awkward and abrupt. Shui looks positively scandalized to have had the story cut short so painfully, when as a storyteller himself, Shui knows that there is something else to be added and that he will not be told. "Now don't look at me like that," you say. "This is the place where you start rapturing about your white-flower-vine woman, and how all of your overtures of love have been successful."

It works, and Shui, while still curious, tells you all about the last time he met with the flower-vine woman that you despise without knowing fully well why. (_Which is a lie, because you know, and think that he probably does too, and are clever enough to never admit to aloud_.)

Later, pairing nightshade leaves while Shui boils water, you think of your abrupt ending. You don't have the heart to tell him that when each bird died, you mourned in your own way, holding hollow boned bodies between your gloved hands and wondering at the briefness of your acquaintance.

What you really wanted to tell him was that you didn't care at all. All the subtext about yourself that the original story has leaves you angry and wanting to throw him from the house.

"The leaves are poisonous," you warn, when he begins to meddle in your work. "You often forget that some plants are dangerous. They will most certainly kill you."

* * *

It is by yourself at night that you allow yourself to finally imagine the woman that Shui holds so much devotion in, and you do this in secret as though doing something that wasn't allowed. You are a magician and sorcerer first and foremost, and the plant comes to mind before the lady each and every time.

She of course is always pale and nigh translucent in her skin, with green veins that are really stems and Shui doesn't have sense enough to notice. He is a poet at heart, and the fantasy of the idea would be just down his stream of thought. But you, you see in it the same qualities that are present in the devil's snare that grows in a mound (_a cairn, your mind supplies_) behind the glade and silent. A pile of trumpeted flowers and spiny leaves.

If you are perfectly honest with yourself, which you have prided yourself in the past for not being a liar in any capacity, you would know that you do not think this woman to be dangerous at all, but probably nothing more than a slip of a girl. She would not be as formidable as you, weak-ankled and frightened by the thunderstorms that you exult in. Blue eyes, not at all interesting, and a little tired by the day's work by the time Shui arrives back in the village. She will offer him tea, Ceylon, and they will sit quietly and plan out their future as though they really had a say in it.

This, however, is not what you want. She needs to be devastating lovely, glorious, white, and deadly. She needs to be a witty young thing that is fey and laughs like chimes. She needs to be everything superior to himself or else you will not be able to understand it. For there is something in this woman that Shui finds more important than you, and you are desperate to discover what this one thing is.

"Be perfect, damn you," you say, turning over in your cot. "Be perfect so that I am inferior in comparison, and not a broken thing, missing the necessary parts. Be perfect so that I don't have to take offense to my own ineptitude."

You are very cold, because despite hundreds of years, you are still mortally afraid of being found wanting. You must train yourself against the weakness of yourself, or be prepared to be hurt. You do so dislike pain.

* * *

"I won't be coming as often now," he says to you one day, beginning to pull his scarves on and throwing his lute over his shoulder. "Datura is a few months pregnant now, and she's beginning to get bigger. She needs me to help her get around, and I've asked she leave the village were in right now. She's gone to a smaller one called Karou. But don't worry!" he adds with a smile. "My life wouldn't be quite the same without you around to boss me into submission, and smack my love addled head back into sense. I'll get her on out of the way and come back to needle at you."

You frown, and try not to think about Datura's pregnancy. It is hard to work your way around the imaginings of Shui lying with some venom-named woman, and it is not such a stretch to imagine this ephemeral Datura being rounded out with child. You do not even think "That's not all, is it?" you ask. "You said you were in a competition for head sanga or something, were you not? Isn't that something to worry about?"

"Hardly," he says with a wave of his hand. "I will rely on providence in this matter and only hope towards the position. It is meant to be, then it will be so, and if not, I still have my charms, don't I?"

You smile, wry and stiff. "Well you certainly have that. But are you unwilling to work for what you want? That seems incredibly lazy of you, Shui."

Shui, pacing back and forth across the wooden floor, only stops for a moment to look at you before turning his head back to the floor where his eyes rest on the knots in the planks. They too are like eyes looking up out of the ground.

"I have too little time between what I must do and what I want to do," he says quietly, regretfully. "Do not think it is for lack of friendship or concern that I will visit less than I have. I want to come, truly I do, but . . . " He looks up, and his eyes, by God, his eyes are fresh and newly cut spring (_don't think of sickles and blades_) and the pleading there is too much for you. You are forced to look away before he sees for certain that you wear your weakness in your eyes and in the trebling of your fists. You understand, but he must never know, lest he understands you in your entirety.

"It is enough that you came to tell me," you say, and adjust the cuffs of your sleeves needlessly. "It was never as if you were obligated to come here every afternoon, and I have done well by myself since long before you were born. I would not have you think me so weak as to be upset by your change of circumstances." (_You are a very poor liar, and wave away the phantasm Datura and her non-perfection before it can rattle you any more than it does after you close your eyes_.)

Shui is quiet for a long time, and you sit at your workbench, glaring down the daytime moon with a hateful glance that you now hide. You refuse to be bothered; you cannot be bothered by something so trifling and little in the grander scheme of things. She was always going to have him in the end, you always knew this, and while you still hold a part of him, it is just not as much and perhaps not as important as her evenings and nights. Even then, you swallow around the ache in your throat that you might suspect is your bitter love trying to break free.

Swallow and breathe. Repeat this over and over again until you are yourself, until you are whole. He will leave with no part of you. You will swallow that escaping piece of yourself until it moves no longer.

You feel before you see Shui's hand on your forearm, gentle and warm and everything you wish it would not be because you are very busy trying to convince yourself that you hate him and will not miss him when his visits grow less. It moves, rubbing warmth back into your chilled skin, and you turn to its owner, face studiously blank.

"You are a good friend, Leaks," he says tenderly. "And you are very generous with yourself, no matter what you may say to the contrary. If it is all right, I would like to say that I understand."

No, you don't, you think. No, it is not all right, and no you don't. And even as you think this, you know that your heart has jumped into your eyes and it is staring Shui in the face with painful clarity. Fortunately, you believe your anger may be hidden in there as well.

"I'll be back soon, maybe in a week. Surely you can entertain yourself that long," Shui says, and steps back. "You've been entertaining yourself for centuries after all."

You feel very old, watching Shui walk himself out, your hand in a tenuous grasp around one of the pitted almonds that you have not yet shelled and prepared. It is sharp and cold against your bare palm, and the only thing in the room that feels real next to the sound of Shui on the front doorstep. He looks at you and waves cheerfully.

He means to be back next week. You will not see him again.

* * *

Fire warms and burns your bitter almond heart to ash, and sometimes, when you think back to the villagers burning down your home, you are able to think of the event objectively. You were angry when Shui left, you were resentful and hateful against the woman that he had deigned choose over you. He may have been afraid of you. He may have wanted to be rid of you forever, you and your selfish love. Before feeling returns to you, while the bodies still smoke with sulfur and coppered lightning, you are able to look at it from the perspective of another.

You waited for weeks for him. You waited until the point where you almost came to ask of him, yes, the redheaded sanga with the fresh-colored eyes and soft temper. You waited until you actually felt the wrenching of your breathing, your pulse, your thoughts, until you did not sleep. You had thought he had abandoned you at last for her, and you were not willing to give that inch, that last bit

And then the blood rushed back into your arms and face, and the only thing you could do is scream.

You are humbled and bitter to know that you had thought better of Shui, to think that he would never let anyone know where you were, to honor the fact that it was you who saved him from digging his grave in the forest. You had long ago learned not to trust, and against everything you tried to do to stop it, you allowed yourself to care. Love rules idiots and naive children, and now sorcerers. This is what hurts, more than the house and the garden, and hundreds of years of study gone up in flames. Things like that can be rebuilt.

"Best not allow myself what I want," he snaps bitterly and laughs, standing over the charred remains of his life. "Best not allow anyone else what they want either. Shows what good supposed friends are."

You want him to feel the same way you do now, only you cannot find him, and for all the revenge and malice there is in your heart, it sits like a stone, very heavy and quiet next to the horrible wrenching feeling that at times is still and at other times leaves you unable to move. For all that anger, you cannot even dare make a step. The disappointment and rawness of your love is too devastating.

"How deject and wretched you have made me," you laugh, and cough smoky water from your eyes. It is of course not tears. You will sit for awhile, angry and enraged as ever, but so sunken and grieved that you dare not bear yourself to another.

It is only with the greatest of effort that you travel to Karou, dragging your feet like iron shoes (_the kind that are hot, like the ones from the human tales that you only remember in the most basic sense._) The forest is cold and green against your face and eyes, soothing, lulling. You would sleep if you were not afraid to sink like a stone into the earth, bury your face and shame in the dirt and roots until time saw fit to make you less a person and more a stone. Maybe you too will become a tree in time.

You will make a lovely aspen tree. Here is your bark white and black like scorched earth and here are your leaves, yellow and red and green with envy. You will be tall and brittle and burn easily because you are so dry, and in the winter you will have sense enough to disappear with the landscape and match the snow.

But your anger is strong enough, tempered enough with passing days to move your feet, to think back on that auburn hair and hate it, think it a rope, a snare. It is _he_ that is the devil's snare, not she, and now you look back on that contemplation with a sneer and a fire in your chest where you think your heart might have been. It has sunk down into the pit of your stomach now. It may have dropped out altogether and been dragging behind.

But you will see them, oh yes you will, you will see the Datura flower-woman, and see if you might find Shui in her stead. The beginning procession of homes against the rock walls of the forest tell you that you are in Karou, and you will find some measure of peace, soon enough.

You will also leave with your heart torn free and swallowed by Shui's unborn child. If nothing else, you still have a grand sense of humor, and find the idea of force-feeding your heart to the prodigy of another's love ironic and hilarious.

He imagines it might taste like rue. What a sour thing grief can be.

* * *

_Ophelia: There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love, _

_remember. And there is pansies, that's for thoughts._

_Laertes: A document in madness! Thoughts and remembrance fitted._

_Ophelia: There's fennel for you, and columbines. There's rue for you,_

_and here's some for me. We may call it herb of grace o' Sundays._

_O, but you must wear your rue with a difference._

-Shakespeare, _Hamlet, Act IV, V _

* * *

A/N: Credits to Shakespeare for his play _Hamlet_ and the one useful in-text quote I used. Feel free to correct me on anything technical that I may have missed.


End file.
